Technology Lab —

Poulsbo mess casts a shadow on Intel’s Moblin project

Intel's puzzling refusal to address the problems with the Linux drivers for …

The Moblin project was launched by Intel in 2007 with the goal of building a Linux-based platform for small form-factor mobile devices. Although the underlying technology is compelling and exhibits considerable potential, Intel's surprising degree of ambivalence on fundamental issues like hardware compatibility and open drivers could threaten Moblin's relevance.

One of the clearest examples of Intel's declining commitment is the company's cavalier disregard for concerns about the status of the Linux drivers for its GMA500 integrated graphics component. The GMA500, which is also known as Poulsbo, is shipped in popular netbooks like the Acer Aspire One and certain Dell Mini models. Unlike Intel's other integrated graphics solutions, Poulsbo is partly based on Imagination Technologies's PowerVR and is only marginally supported on Linux. The Poulsbo drivers are a complete disaster and are almost impossible for Linux vendors to support.

Watching the Poulsbo trainwreck

The open source parts of the Poulsbo driver, which are now in the "deprecated" section of the Moblin git tree, are unmaintained and haven't received improvements since March, 2008. This code won't work at all with recent versions of the Linux kernel. The drivers also require proprietary binary blobs—which apparently can't be freely redistributed—for handling things like 3D acceleration. For greater technical insight into how badly the drivers are broken, you can refer to Red Hat QA engineer Adam Williamson's detailed blog entry on the subject, Intel GMA 500 graphics on Linux: a precise and comprehensive summary as to why you're screwed.

The crappy Poulsbo Linux drivers are practically notorious by now, so these issues aren't exactly news to Linux enthusiasts who have been watching the fiasco unfold for over a year; it has been like a trainwreck in slow motion. The real problem is Intel's lack of responsiveness to the concerns expressed by the Linux community. Intel has responded to criticism with extraordinary dismissiveness and has failed to provide meaningful clarification about the extent to which it intends to provide Linux software support for the hardware that it sells to vendors.

Several well-known Linux bloggers have recently attempted to raise awareness of the issue, but Intel's response has not been very promising. Shawn Powers of Linux Journal expressed frustration about Intel in an October article, How To Kick Your Friends in the Face: GMA500.

"The folks in charge of kernel developing, X.org developing, and major distribution packaging all have the same thing to say about the GMA500 chipset—and I'm not allowed to publish those sort of words on a company blog," he wrote. "So Intel, I have to ask—what were you thinking? Don't you realize if you want to remain a powerhouse in the small form and embedded market you have to have a good relationship with Linux developers? Do you know current versions of Moblin, your very own baby, don't work with your GMA500 chipset?!"

Intel's Moblin astroturf blog: "Closed drivers? Who cares!"

In response to the Linux Journal article, Intel's MoblinZone blog published a bizarre editorial that downplays the importance of open drivers and claims that users who are dissatisfied with the lack of support for GMA500 on Linux are at fault for buying products with that hardware. The editorial was written by Henry Kingman, who argues that open drivers aren't needed in the mobile and embedded space because products in that market don't have to be user-upgradeable.

"If some of the device drivers are closed, what does it matter? The system is 'embedded'—it's tied closely to the actual hardware present on the platform—and the user is never expected to change anything about the core system, neither hardware nor software. Even the manufacturer might not ever expect to upgrade the firmware on the device, once it's shipped. Closed drivers? Who cares!" he wrote. "Not only is there no significant penalty for closed drivers in the device world, sometimes, they work out better. There's a business advantage, in terms of vendor lock-in. If I'm a chip maker, my customer has to come back to me for a new driver or source-level license (with non-disclosure agreement) when they begin working on a new product model, or a firmware upgrade."

He seems to be arguing that closed Linux drivers are a good business move because that approach to Linux support will allow the chip maker to extract recurring licensing revenue from the OEMs every time they want to make their devices work with a new version of the kernel. That kind of behavior is so egregiously antithetical to the principles of Linux development that I can't really imagine that any upstream Linux developers would consider it acceptable. If Intel and its partners want to do that kind of thing, it's their prerogative--but it's absolutely not going to help Moblin's credibility.

After seeing the MoblinZone editorial, I began trying to get clarification from Intel. I wanted to give the company an opportunity to distance itself from the claims in the blog post and provide more insight into what went wrong with Poulsbo and how the company hopes to correct the problem. Unfortunately, I didn't get much.

MoblinZone's front page lists Intel as one of its "featured partners," but does not indicate who actually operates the site. Intel's corporate address, however, appears on MoblinZone's terms of service and privacy policy. Some readers thought that the whole site smelled of astroturf. Such suspicions were apparently well-founded—Kingman openly confirmed it in a discussion about his editorial at LWN.

"Howdy, author Henry here. Yep, MoblinZone is astroturfing. But, it's also paying my bills during a career transition," he wrote.

I asked Intel several questions about the MoblinZone website and the offending blog post. They said that they play a role in funding the site, but they claim to have no direct editorial involvement with the content. They declined to answer my question about whether the content of the blog post represents Intel's position. They have also not issued a retraction, so I can only assume that they condone its claims.

Intel acknowledges problem, denies responsibility

The real question at this point is whether Intel plans to take steps to address the issues with the Poulsbo driver or ensure that future products are better supported. When we put this question to Intel, they acknowledged that their GMA500 hardware is poorly supported on Linux, but they denied that they have a responsibility to make it work.

"As an open source community effort, the Moblin project relies on commitment from various vendors in the ecosystem to deliver and support device drivers. In the case of the GMA500 series, no vendors have been able to deliver or maintain this driver for Moblin. Despite demonstrations of platforms with partial GMA500 support, a fully-tested and supported driver for the GMA500 remains unavailable," Intel told Ars. "Intel understands the frustration Moblin enthusiasts are experiencing with the lack of support and are aware of how this impacts the perception of Moblin, however the Moblin project team remains hopeful that a member of the ecosystem will choose to support GMA500 drivers in the future."

Intel has been courting the Linux community with the hope of expanding its involvement in Moblin so that they can build mindshare for their technology. The company, however, doesn't seem to feel any responsibility for making sure that the hardware that it sells to OEM's is fully compatible with the Moblin platform. That's not a good way to attract supporters.

One of the reasons that the Linux community has shown so much enthusiasm for Moblin is because the project had serious potential to boost OEM confidence in Linux hardware compatibility. That potential has evaporated in the face of evidence that Intel can't or won't provide any meaningful compatibility guarantees.

Even if Intel can't make arrangements to open the binary blobs (which are licensed from Imagination Technologies) it should at least make sure that the blobs are publicly available and that the open source wrappers are properly maintained and compatible with the latest versions of the Linux kernel. In a mailing list post written six months ago, Intel Linux engineer Richard Purdie said that he was working on making that happen. Nothing has come of it, however, and the source code is still bitrotting. Based on what their spokesman has told Ars, the company has given up on solving the problem itself and is now contending that it is up to the Moblin "vendor ecosystem" to make it work.

A light at the end of the tunnel?

What makes this entire situation so profoundly frustrating is that it is entirely out of character for Intel, a company that has historically been one of the stronger backers of the Linux platform. A lot of Intel's other integrated graphics hardware is extremely well supported on Linux, and its open source drivers are maintained directly by Intel. Some of the most important improvements to Xorg and the kernel graphics stack in recent history have been funded by Intel and implemented by the incredibly smart people that Intel employs to make Xorg work.

For that reason, I remain hopeful that Intel will eventually accept responsibility and start taking steps to address the problems with Poulsbo. If it doesn't, the company risks undermining the credibility of the Moblin initiative and could lose its reputation as a company that is committed to making Linux-compatible products.

Last month, the Linux Foundation leaked some information alleging that a new officially-supported closed-source Linux driver for Poulsbo would be coming soon and that it will be based on Gallium3D. Although another closed-source driver is far from an ideal outcome, it would be a very welcome improvement. Phoronix, which has had good ongoing coverage of the situation with Poulsbo, published a report in early November about the rumored driver overhaul.

Unfortunately, Intel has not confirmed the rumor and the new driver has still not materialized. Phoronix posted an update last week saying that Intel may have changed its mind.

"We have learned that the updated kernel and Gallium3D drivers should have premiered with Moblin 2.1 that was released in November, but at the last minute Intel apparently diverted from their plans," wrote Phoronix. "We have no update as to when the new driver may reach the general public, but hopefully we will not be waiting for Moblin 2.2 in 2010."

Intel has told Ars that it is not working on a Poulsbo fix, so I'm skeptical that the rumored driver will ever emerge. If Intel cares at all about restoring confidence in its commitment to Moblin, now would be a very good time to do something about the problem, or at least provide some transparency if they have a partial solution in progress.

44 Reader Comments

Fortunately according to Acer leaks, the mainstream Atom N450 and D410/510 have GMA3150, so regular-spec netbooks will still run Linux fine next year. It's not nearly as fast as Ion, but the Linux drivers are pretty solid and intel has a better reliability track-record

In response to the Linux Journal article, Intel's MoblinZone blog published a bizarre editorial that downplays the importance of open drivers and claims that users who are dissatisfied with the lack of support for GMA500 on Linux are at fault for buying products with that hardware.

Wow. That's just ... wow. Slap their wife and kick their dog while you're at it. Only the most anal-retentive techie knows all the hardware in a device they use. Regular folks just buy stuff based on marketing bling and word-of-mouth. Then they find out they're saddled with a dud.

Mandatory Car Analogy (MCA)...

"You didn't know the rubber for the tires came from Guatemala, and it's inferior? Well, sucks to be you for not doing your homework. Deal with it."

Can Intel release a proper open source driver for a PowerVR component? From what I know, Intel's driver support for their own silicon has always been fairly good. Thought the article is a bit over the top, although the Poulsbo thing certainly is a mess. Not sure why "don't buy a PowerVR laptop" is such outrageous advice.

really, I am to the point of not caring anymore. I just can't get passionate about hardware companies not supporting my OS of choice. It isn't worth it.It is just one more item to check off my list of acceptable parts to be in a laptop/netbook I buy in the future.(and yes, I do check what parts are in the computers i can't easily build before I buy)

All I want is to be supported. Is that too much to ask? I don't care about market share, or profits, or anything else.I want my hardware and software to not be dictated to me by large corporations who don't give a shit about their consumers.

I bought an awesome little ruggedized Panasonic CF-U1 UMPC for $2800 CDN! (yes you read that right) A longtime Linux user, I made sure to look up the components first, and when I saw "Intel graphics", I thought I was good to go (I trusted you Intel!). I had no idea at the time that they had a separate PSB chipset from their "regular" well supported ones! Well, I sure know that now. And to make it worse, the VESA driver can't mode-set my non-standard screen resolution. So the thing is mostly a $2800 paperweight, and I'm right pissed.

This isn't surprising in the least. Intel doesn't care as long as it gets the green. What green does linux have to offer them? Probably significantly less than a proprietary system from another company that they then wouldn't have to pay to support them selves.

Originally posted by bfstev:This isn't surprising in the least. Intel doesn't care as long as it gets the green. What green does linux have to offer them? Probably significantly less than a proprietary system from another company that they then wouldn't have to pay to support them selves.

Uh.. you're not thinking of this in the right direction:

Broader OS support for the HARDWARE that Intel makes and sells means that it will be more likely used in other vendors integrated products. Not supporting Linux at the chipset/mainboard level just ensures you don't sell as many pieces of hardware in that line.

That said, Intel has a very broad array of products that work in similar space as what the GMA500 set is, so it may not be that big of a loss for them. Unless they're afraid of another vendor. Like AMD. Or Freescale. Or any of the plethora of other embedded hardware manufacturers.

Originally posted by moritz-s:From what I know, Intel's driver support for their own silicon has always been fairly good.

I disagree. Intel's driver support is very basic, at best. Their IGPs always fall short of expectations, and most of the time it's because of their poor drivers. The company that couldn't get T&L to work years ago can't get HD-acceleration working today. Good CPUs? Yes. Good chipsets? Mostly yes. Good IGPs? Heck no.

Intel has many developers on X.org, and has employees building the 'intel' driver, they are leading the show in terms of release management and features like KMS... despite the PSB mess, the drivers for their core chipsets lead the way.

AMD doesn't employ people to work on the 'ati' driver, but they have open specifications at least, and the driver is thus generally just one step behind intel (KMS support, etc).

Nvidia is the worst... they have no employees moving the nv or noveau driver forward, and no open specs... all code must be reverse engineered at great expense.

If you mean proprietary drivers, well, those suck, and if you are OK with closed source and no Freedom, just go get yourself a Mac - it will probably work better with 1/10 the pain.

Unlike Intel's other integrated graphics solutions, Poulsbo is partly based on Imagination Technologies's PowerVR and is only marginally supported on Linux.

I thought ALL of Intel's GMA's were based off PowerVR-based technology. I know that origionally, Intel didn't contract Imagination T for drivers for their products, but instead licensed it out to another company. Either way, The support is HORRIBLE in Linux. Even AMD has made massive imrpovements in linux drivers.

I think that the primary problem is that Intel didn't create the GMA500. They bought it from someone else, and they can't legally release the source code. That's why it's so out of character for them.

This is certainly a bad outcome; it would really suck to have gotten a GMA500 instead of all the other better supported cards.

vw_fan17:I'd say that in Linux it goest Intel > Nvidia > cardboard box > ATI. Intel cards are usually great because they don't need separate drivers (included in the kernel sine .31 or somewhere around there). They work very reliably with suspend, which is my big complaint with my Nvidia card right now. Obviously, Nvidia (and ATI) make much better hardware, but the closed source drivers are a problem quite frequently. ATI cards are the worst and should be avoided at all costs. The driver is ~90MB (WTF?), doesn't work very well, has poor features (no opengl 3.0, no hw acceleration for video, poor AA -- Phoronix just reported on that yesterday, and glacial development). They do have a couple of nice things, but they are superficial: graphical installer (switching to run level for Nvidia is a PITA and bad for newbies) and... (it was so insignificant I can't remember it).

Please do refer to _all_ the posts on my blog, not just one of the very earliest. The psb driver fell out of Moblin git ages ago and now mostly lives in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix tree(s), into which updates periodically Mystically Appear. The last time any bits of it were touched was in June. It can be made to work reasonably trivially with current kernels, but not with X server 1.7, which is a significant problem for Fedora 12 and will be a significant problem for the next round of releases for all other distros (MDV 2010.1, Ubuntu 10.04 et al). It is included out of the box in Mandriva 2010, available from RPM Fusion for Fedora 11, and there's documentation on how to install it for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 available on the Ubuntu Forums.

There's an alternative driver that's available from Intel's embedded side, referred to as the IEGD driver. You can find it here: http://edc.intel.com/Software/...loads/IEGD/#download . It comes as part of a 150MB Windows self-extracting executable, from which you can draw your own conclusions about how well it respects typical Linux development practices...it seems to provide some functions the psb driver doesn't (e.g. it apparently actually works with the Moblin desktop), but as a trade-off, only supports one of the two Poulsbo PCI IDs.

To those who say Poulsbo is going to be obsolete within a month, I say hmm. You may be thinking of Larrabee as a successor. That would be the Larrabee that Intel announced a few days ago isn't going to be released as consumer hardware, instead as a 'platform for research and development', with no particularly solid ship date set. Which, translated into Human, means 'it's fucked and we don't know how to fix it'. You may also be thinking of Moorestown / Pine Trail / whatever the hell other codenames they have floating around, but from all I've heard, that's going to have the GMA 500 or something very much like it (some kind of PowerVR SGX core) as its graphics controller. I'm not aware of any solid plans for future Intel chipsets in the same market segment where Poulsbo is currently used to have some radically different kind of chip.

ChiefNuts: no, the only Intel graphics chipset currently available based on PowerVR is the GMA 500. The GMA 950 and 3000 and 3100 and 3500 and 4500 are all Intel's own cores (basically very much the same as the i9xx series).

Intel's commitment to any of their graphics products is shit, period. They can't even get drivers right for their own products on Windows (e.g.. their OpenGL implementation is notoriously substandard), so I'm not really surprised by this.

Originally posted by moritz-s:From what I know, Intel's driver support for their own silicon has always been fairly good.

I disagree. Intel's driver support is very basic, at best. Their IGPs always fall short of expectations, and most of the time it's because of their poor drivers. The company that couldn't get T&L to work years ago can't get HD-acceleration working today. Good CPUs? Yes. Good chipsets? Mostly yes. Good IGPs? Heck no.

And their Matrix drivers for their SATA controllers are poor at best. Does Intel make any good drivers?

I have a feeling that Intel is actually giving up on the MID market, and has decided to allow ARM based products to own it.

Intel has acknowledged that they just can’t fully support an inexpensive <5W system. That if you want fully supported graphics you’ll have to move up to >10Watts. Try building a MID that has to dissipate 18Watts.

The ARM Cortex-A8 based OMAP3530 isn’t too shabby and it has a PowerVR based graphic acceleration supported within Linux. That’s not quite up to the power of the ATOM GMA500 based Z530, but I’m pretty sure the Cortex A9 will start to eat Intels lunch.

I do feel bad for anyone that bought into Intels promises regarding the GMA500.

That it could do HD decoding, OpenGL graphics, etc. The hardware specifications go way beyond what is currently available software wise for the GMA500.

I do have a guide on how to install the Linux Graphics drivers for the GMA500. It's about 10 pages long so I gave it to our software developer to do and he laughed at it. Guess we're sticking with Windows Embedded for now.

Originally posted by hubick:... If you mean proprietary drivers, well, those suck... .

Those evil closed source nvidia drivers work perfectly fine. VDPAU also works great.

Hubick's assertion was a value judgment about the freedom of NVidia's drivers, sprockkets, not about their functionality; I think nobody will argue the latter point (well, unless you care about kernel modesetting, or GEM, Gallium 3D, or anything else which requires cooperating with the Xorg developers), but your counterargument is disingenuous at best.

VDPAU is a well-designed API, and NVidia has delivered an excellent implementation of it; and the performance of NVidia hardware typically outstrips that of Intel's IGPs by an order of magnitude or more; but neither of these facts addresses hubick's (and my) complaint that NVidia fails to provide the kind of open drivers that I demand on any system for which I am responsible, personally or professionally.

The NVidia driver argument is about suitability for a given purpose, and we have different purposes, so how can we have a constructive argument?

The fact that Intel now owns WindRiver and is running the moblin project and yet does not support their own common embedded/netbook hardware is fucking pathetic. As is the fact that Ubuntu seems to be supporting Intel's products better than Intel. I have been fighting with my Dell mini 10v and moblin for weeks to no avail...and I am definitely not new to this sort of thing. If anyone has instructions for getting moblin 2.1 working with /any/ of the IEDG releases I would love to hear about it, because all of my attempts have been a complete disaster. Intel should be ashamed by the current state of GMA 500 support and their obvious lack of progress / transparency. This just reminds me why I buy AMD for my desktops and servers, I try to put my money where my mouth is whenever possible.

Oh and before anyone gives me a hard time about not researching my netbook purchase I actually bought it because I'm working on an embedded project with the intel IVI development kit. The mini 10v has nearly identical hardware specs to the IVI kit giving me a nice little mobile development kit (or would have with proper drivers). Of course the fact that the IVI kit claims to be supported with moblin and obviously isn't (thanks GMA 500) is a completely different pathetic Intel story.

Originally posted by S4WRXTTCS:... Intel has acknowledged that they just can’t fully support an inexpensive <5W system. ...

I'm not disputing your point about the power envelope, but can you point at an article, video or transcript where Intel actually acknowledged this? I would be quite surprised to see that, and would really quite like to put it in context.

quote:

Originally posted by S4WRXTTCS:The ARM Cortex-A8 based OMAP3530 isn’t too shabby and it has a PowerVR based graphic acceleration supported within Linux. That’s not quite up to the power of the ATOM GMA500 based Z530, but I’m pretty sure the Cortex A9 will start to eat Intels lunch.

The Texas Instruments OMAP3530 has a PowerVR SGX 530 graphics core, while the US15(W/L) system controller hub (the one paired with the Z-series Atom chips) bears a PowerVR SGX 535. They're quite similar in terms of architecture, but the 535 is claimed to be able to process about twice the number of polygons per seconds (28 Mpolys/second vs 14) and has a few other improvements.

Texas Instrument's OMAP 4 series will be their first to include the Cortex A-9 (a chip which, as you say, ought to make the subnotebook product space very interesting indeed), but it will include a PowerVR SGX 540: 20-35 Mpolys/second, with most of the differentiation happening at the feature rather than the performance level. This is the reason why although I am very enthusiastic about Cortex A-9 machines, I am really not looking forward to attending to the mess of their PowerVR graphics stack.

(it breaks my heart to see PowerVR dragged through the mud on the Linux front, since I love the efficiency and elegance of their architecture, but on my priority scale open drivers soundly trump pleasant hardware)

I hold out hope that Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC efforts will provide some competition in the embedded graphics space, but frankly PowerVR rules there for a very good reason. I just hope that *someone* steps up so that Linux users in the embedded space don't end up trapped between the SGX's Scylla and Tegra's Charybdis.

And on beyond the horizon, off in hail-mary territory, there's the outside chance that maciek_urbanski's reverse engineering efforts will someday bear fruit...

Originally posted by ChrisC:I think the problem here is that Intel doesn't own the IP. Tungsten Graphics and Imagination Technologies do.

Just so, sir, although ImgTec owns quite a bit more of the IP than TG. Quite telling are the Tungsten Graphics xf86-video-psbpsb.tex and, much more so, design.tex, visible in the deprecated branch of the Moblin v1 codebase which reveal that Intel is (or at least was, in 2007) pushing as hard as it is able to do in its situation to open as much code as possible, even though those requirements may prolong and complicate the development process, and therefore push the budget beyond its projected envelope.

One can only imagine how the Intel Xorg hackers and developers feel about being saddled with the hardware decision made at a business level quite a few rungs up the ladder.

Most of the people who are dismissing this don't seem to get why some people are upset. This is not about a hardware vendor releasing hardware with only closed source drivers, that still happens sometimes. No biggie. This is also not about a hardware vendors releasing only closed source drivers and then not updating it to work with newer Linux versions, that also happens sometimes, though it definitely is frustrating.

This is about a company that is pushing their own embedded software platform as a way of selling more of their various chips aimed at running on said platform, but then refuse to create the needed drivers for the very same chips they want to sell. This for a chip that is still sold. If Intel can't be bothered to get Moblin support for the current release of their own netbook hardware, how can we have any confidence at all in the platform they're pushing.

My take is this: Intel is a big company, and sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Poulsbo was probably simply a mistake, and they won't repeat it. It would be too expensive to get proper Linux support for it, because PowerVR doesn't care, doesn't want it's source code open sourced and refuses to help out. It may even be the case that Intel has signed an NDA that prohibits them from exposing the internal workings if the Poulsbo chip to the public, making it impossible for them to legally develop open drivers for Poulsbo. If that is the case, all it would take for most people would be a very clear statement from Intel saying something like:

The handling of the driver issue in Poulsbo was a mistake from Intels side. We will not in the future release any new graphics hardware without proper, open Linux driver support. We are however unable to support Poulsbo under Linux either now or in the future. Sorry.

Intel has many developers on X.org, and has employees building the 'intel' driver, they are leading the show in terms of release management and features like KMS... despite the PSB mess, the drivers for their core chipsets lead the way.

AMD doesn't employ people to work on the 'ati' driver, but they have open specifications at least, and the driver is thus generally just one step behind intel (KMS support, etc).

Nvidia is the worst... they have no employees moving the nv or noveau driver forward, and no open specs... all code must be reverse engineered at great expense.

If you mean proprietary drivers, well, those suck, and if you are OK with closed source and no Freedom, just go get yourself a Mac - it will probably work better with 1/10 the pain.

Please educate yourself before spewing more nonsense. As AdamWill pointed out, AMD pays people to work on the ati driver, with NDA docs (those which aren't released). I would add that the -nv driver is indeed provided and maintained by nvidia.

To people making "lists" of "best GPU manufacturers" for Linux - get over it. The overall graphics situation in Linux is still a steaming pile and the best choice depends on one's priorities. I know people who want 3D will only go for nvidia until ati provides a similar experience (that could take very long time). I don't give a crap about 3D and ironically, nvidia totally fails (worse than ati or intel) at display hotplugging. Restarting X server just because I attached a second monitor to run a presentation on? You gotta be shittin' me, the 90's are calling. Come back when you get XR&R 1.2 at least.

So which graphics products do have "proper Linux support?" Here's the situation as I've been able to glean from off-and-on Phoronix reading:-ATI is doing a lot recently to move the open drivers for their chips, including sponsoring the open driver from Novell, but they're still way behind there and even behind in their proprietary drivers. They still have very few people working on Linux support, though. -Nvidia doesn't support open drivers at all except as a totally gimped, 2d-accelerated-only driver for X.org. Their binary blob is better than ATI's, but still not keeping up with recent Linux graphics developments.-Intel has apparently written off the GMA500 in terms of Linux support. If it's because of NDAs and terms under which they've been licensed the tech, there's a better way to handle that than what we've just seen. If you need Linux support with Intel, they do much better with the 945 for netbooks and GMA 4xxx and lower for desktops, but the hardware is anemic. -Via is still dragging their feet and not living up to their earlier promises of open driver support, and have crappy drivers for anything not-Windows.

Who do you go with? Nvidia for better out-of-the-box support right now? ATI for better supporting open source drives? Intel for great driver support on older, weak hardware?

Originally posted by ChrisC:I think the problem here is that Intel doesn't own the IP. Tungsten Graphics and Imagination Technologies do.

Just so, sir, although ImgTec owns quite a bit more of the IP than TG. Quite telling are the Tungsten Graphics xf86-video-psbpsb.tex and, much more so, design.tex, visible in the deprecated branch of the Moblin v1 codebase which reveal that Intel is (or at least was, in 2007) pushing as hard as it is able to do in its situation to open as much code as possible, even though those requirements may prolong and complicate the development process, and therefore push the budget beyond its projected envelope.

One can only imagine how the Intel Xorg hackers and developers feel about being saddled with the hardware decision made at a business level quite a few rungs up the ladder.

This is correct, however, it doesn't really mean anything. It was Intel's decision in the first place to take the quick and dirty route of sub-contracting the job of writing the driver to Tungsten, rather than doing it themselves (and accepting a partly-closed subcontracted driver). The responsibility is ultimately theirs either way.

You and several others are also taking too simple a view of Intel, here. When you say 'the Intel Xorg hackers and developers' you are probably thinking of the Intel folks who work on the existing 'intel' X.org driver. They are part of Intel's Open Technology Group. They haven't really been saddled with anything, because they have nothing to do with anything involving Poulsbo. The OTG is not involved at all. Poulsbo stuff is driven by the embedded group and by the Ultra Mobile Group, neither of which has much history with F/OSS and neither of which seems to give much of a toss about it.

"Linux users should be voting with their wallets and buying products with proper Linux support--not buying products with crappy/non-existent Linux support and then bitching and moaning about it."

Except that's part of the whole _problem_ here: people have been told for years to buy Intel graphics hardware because Intel plays nicest with F/OSS development, and suddenly they release a chip that's a gigantic nightmare. It's mostly people who _do_ try to 'do the right thing' who've got bitten here.

(There's also systems where you don't have much of a choice. There is no alternative to the Vaio P which has similar characteristics, for instance.)

Except that's part of the whole _problem_ here: people have been told for years to buy Intel graphics hardware because Intel plays nicest with F/OSS development, and suddenly they release a chip that's a gigantic nightmare. It's mostly people who _do_ try to 'do the right thing' who've got bitten here.

I don't see that as a problem. I said to buy products with proper Linux support; G500 doesn't have and has never had that, so no-one with a functioning braincell will have bought one for Linux.

quote:

(There's also systems where you don't have much of a choice. There is no alternative to the Vaio P which has similar characteristics, for instance.)

If you really must buy such hardware (which I don't believe) then use a different OS.